Q: How would you define “ghostreading,” and why did the FBI
find it necessary to examine the work of African American writers so closely?

A: I don’t quite define it in the book. I’m obviously
playing with the idea of ghostwriting. The FBI was full of ghostwriters who
wrote for J. Edgar Hoover…I’m playing with the idea of a secret cadre of
readers who were asked to look into books, and the results can’t be seen.

As I try to emphasize in the book, the great majority of African-American
writers who were spied on by the FBI had a very good idea that this was going
on.

Q: Why did J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI focus on these
writers?

A: It’s not a question with a simple answer. Early on,
Hoover entered the Bureau in 1919, and was the chief of the Radical Division,
which was really the anti-radical division. He was an extremely young man, 24
years old. The first thing that happened under his watch is a wave of radical
rebellion, and the reaction boils over to race rioting in the summer of 1919.

From the very beginning of his professional life at the
Bureau, Hoover had to be attentive to the idea of American radicalism and black
expression.

He comes up in D.C. when it was not just segregated, but
segregating. There were rumors—I have no idea if they’re true—there were always
rumors about his having black ancestry. Whether or not that was the case, it
was something he faced…

For a while, the FBI aspired to know everything. Hoover
spied on lots of people, including lots of writers, not just black writers.
[But there was] always a particular interest in black writers, in part because
of the fear of black radicalism.

Q: You’ve mentioned that the writers tended to be aware of the
FBI’s scrutiny of their work. How did they react?

A: There was a range of reactions. If you’re particularly
cynical about the FBI, you would think people would be frightened into
cypherlike writing…. By the late 1960s, black intellectuals were convinced they
were targets, with some justification.

A number of black writers were made self-conscious and
perhaps quieted, but there’s not a lot of evidence that people didn’t get to
publish [what they wanted]. There’s more evidence that black writers were
giving clues in their writing that they knew what was up.

In the early journalistic Harlem Renaissance writing
[people] respond by saying this is full of errors and deep racism, but also is
evidence that the government is paying attention to us and taking our writing
seriously.

From the beginning, writers responded in print to the FBI
surveillance, from the Harlem Renaissance through Invisible Man—it was not in
the final version, but in a draft, Ralph Ellison had the character imagining
himself as an FBI man.

It was explicit in the 1960s…black nationalist poets wrote
poems directly about J. Edgar Hoover…as a symbol of the American state and the
American state’s effort to interfere with and surveil black radicals. I try to
emphasize that people didn’t go in fear of this. It probably produced as much
writing as it silenced.

Q: Your research for this book included newly released FBI
files. How cooperative was the FBI in dealing with your requests?

A: The FBI was great! The modern FBI is a different
organization. John F. Fox Jr., the in-house historian at the FBI, was initially
cooperative. They probably hate me there now! He was very accommodating and
welcomed me to the reading rooms…

I have a lot of problems with the history of American state
spying, but the fact that we can extract these files is pretty extraordinary. I
have to tip my hat to the FBI.

Q: Why did you decide on “F.B. Eyes” as your book’s title,
and what do you see as the importance of the Richard Wright poem “The FB Eye
Blues”?

A: I think that term derives from something FBI agents used
to call themselves. I was a teenager in the 1970s [and had a] childhood versed
in FBI lore; I watched Efrem Zimbalist Jr. My father was a campus radical, so I
had a split [view]. It’s a fascinating organization.

The main reason [for the title] comes from the Richard
Wright poem. He was maybe the central African-American author of the mid-20th
century, and was very frankly [discussing] the FBI’s ability to hound him…It
shows the internal FBI history and the Bureau spying, and the way African-American
writers used it.

Originally, we had FB Eyes without periods, and the
production editor said you can’t use it without periods, because everybody will
think the book is about Facebook!

Q: Are you working on another book?

A: Right this second, I’m not—I’m enjoying the academic
equivalent of 15 minutes of fame! Lots of people seem interested, particularly
in Europe. I’ve written a bunch of things before, but never what actual people
are interested in!

I’m considering writing a book about the history of black
music in St. Louis [especially] given St. Louis’s history of racial travails.
There was incredible talent—Scott Joplin, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, Chuck
Berry.

They wind up helping to integrate American music. They were
St. Louis geniuses all invested in integrating, in a town with a brutal history
of segregation. [At first] I thought the people of St. Louis might be
interested but who else? Now, we see St. Louis as a test case; St. Louis in
some ways is America…

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: It’s a book by an academic who wanted to stay awake while
writing the book! It’s like a better-than-average academic book, but it is an
academic book.

It’s full of history Americans should know, and it shows the
heroism of some of these authors. Now that we’ve discovered that so many were
shadowed, it increases my respect for them. It’s not the history of the KGB,
where people would be carted off and murdered, but we had a minor-league
version, and the writers managed to stick it out.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).